


We Might as Well be Strangers

by elisi



Series: Not the Last [10]
Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-02
Updated: 2016-06-03
Packaged: 2018-07-11 20:13:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7068346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elisi/pseuds/elisi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He woke to devastation. (How the Seeker regenerated the second time)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Setting: Some 30 years prior to A Good Day.

_I don't know your face no more_  
_Or feel your touch that I adore_  
_I don't know your face no more_  
_It's just a place I'm looking for_

_I don't know your thoughts these days_  
_We're strangers in an empty space_  
_I don't understand your heart_  
_It's easier to be apart_  
([x](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzj_ZLcYE5w))

**One**

He woke to devastation.

The first time he’d regenerated it had been a choice - an angry choice with no possible alternatives - but a choice nonetheless. And he’d walked away with that clarity and sharpness of purpose inbuilt; as clear and bright and uncompromising as his fiery hair.

But this time…

Maybe a Matrix had been a vanity project; thinking that he could re-create what the ancients of Gallifrey had built, all on his own.

Foolish, ridiculous vanity was certainly his main thought once he woke and understood what had happened. A simple miscalculation, somewhere, somehow, and he’d only realised it at the last moment - having but a fraction of a second in which to prepare himself for the blast which tore through decades’ worth of work; the destruction so complete that once he came round (new body, new eyes, new mind) he was paralysed for hours by the loss.

He sat up slowly, working out the passing of time by the position of the suns, and for hours merely observed the destruction all around him. There was nothing salvageable, nothing to show the attempted grandeur that had been there so very recently, only debris and mangled metal stretching further than his eyes could see.

(What colour were his eyes this time, he wondered idly. What colour his hair? What did he look like? It didn’t really matter. What mattered was the failure now etched into him.)

Eventually he got up, new legs unsteady beneath him, knowing he should be grateful he’d been at the periphery - had he been closer to the centre of the explosion he’d have been gone for good.

And when would someone have discovered this? He was alone on the planet, and although Roda and Jack dropped by now and again, it could have been an age before anyone realised he was dead…

He’d always sought out solitude, but in that instant the loneliness weighed on him.

Thankfully the laser had escaped unscathed, so he teleported back to his house, pulled on whichever clothes were nearest to hand (ill fitting, dishevelled, but he didn’t care, they were better than the beautifully tailored suit he’d put on that morning, now torn to shreds) and went to find his lover.

(“I screwed up. _Really_ screwed up. Can I cling to you for a while, until I find my bearings again?”)

But it was not to be…

 

(If you have not already done so, now read [Goodbye, Lover](http://archiveofourown.org/works/549376/chapters/15623791))


	2. Chapter 2

_We might as well be strangers in another town  
We might as well be living in a another time_

_We might as well be strangers in another town  
We might as well be living in a different world_

_We might as well be strangers_  
_Be strangers_  
_For all I know of you now_  
([x](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzj_ZLcYE5w))

**Two**

“I just don’t _want_ you anymore,” Roda said; upset or angry or maybe both, almost physically recoiling from his touch.

Another failure, but on a much deeper level, and not one that could be mended the way his body had knitted back together…

The reason why she had such an innate aversion for his new face would probably reveal itself in time - it could be that he reminded her of someone who had hurt her… Or maybe he would go on to upset her in future? Whatever the cause for her withdrawal, it was not for him to ask, nor for her to reveal. But it closed a chapter, leaving him with only devastation for a second time, surveying the broken remains of what had once been something approaching a relationship.

Had it been vanity again, thinking that it was _him_ she wanted, the constant beneath the changing faces? (She was the Redjay, he should count himself lucky that she’d chosen to perch by him, even for a short while.)

Returning home, he stopped at a lake, throwing away the badly fitting clothing before swimming for more than an hour. The cold water refreshing and stinging his newly born skin.

He studied his reflection in the water as much as he was able; shifting, shimmering, fragmented. Black unruly hair, green eyes, a face still foreign and unknown…

One of the suns set, and he could glimpse stars at the edge of the horizon. The loneliness was biting, but in that moment he also knew the cure.

Creating a TARDIS couldn’t be called _easy_ , but compared to a Matrix it was relatively straightforward. He would sit in his garden under his plum tree, working out the schematics, half-smiling to himself as he remembered his childhood, some of the human children thinking him so odd he ‘should go build himself a robot pal’. Little did they know.

One day he found a dark purple coat at the back of a wardrobe, and liked it. It set off his eyes nicely.

He went to see Jack, but - as he had more than half-suspected - Jack was ‘off’ with him as well. Analysing Jack’s behaviour, there was awkwardness, but also (beneath that) something the Seeker categorised as ‘attraction’ - appreciation in glances and halted touches, so subtle that Jack might not even be aware of them himself. The Seeker pretended not to notice, and left with a half-smile and a nod, by now automatically covering the discomfort with detachment. Jack’s loyalty was forever, the Seeker knew that, whether brotherly or otherwise. Still - he’d keep a distance this time round.

His father remarked that he missed the red hair.

Roda, when asked for help with the more complicated mechanics, gave it without question, but also without any warmth. As if they were practically strangers.

The Doctor - when he accidentally landed in the Seeker’s courtyard one afternoon, clearly expecting to be somewhere else - was wearing a purple coat instead of tweed and thought a TARDIS was an excellent idea. He also approved of the Seeker’s coat, and the Seeker let him have his moment. The invisible wall between himself and those closest to him was beginning to feel like protection; even the Doctor had betrayed him, and not just once.

The silence and the quiet seemed to settle within him, growing deeper with every solitary day. The suns would rise and the suns would set, celestial beauty that marked out his time; and in the cold nights that followed the warm days, he heard whispers from his earliest days.

_“The last of humanity screaming at the dark.”_

_“There was no solution, no diamonds. Just the dark and the cold.”_

For the first time he wondered what lay at the end of the universe, which had also been the beginning of him - a sight that had driven his father to pity, his mother to madness. And at the end of which undertaking lay a failed and futile attempt at empire, a broken timeline from which he had been born.

It seemed a fitting maiden voyage for his TARDIS.

He could never pinpoint the day or the hour when the symbiotic link had started. It had grown, unseen, like a seed sending out roots below ground, and by the time he became aware of it the only thing he could think to compare it to was falling in love. Except it was a love of the kind he had always shied away from, ever since the unforgivable mistakes of his early youth that still haunted him. And yet here it was - as simple, and vital, as breathing. He laid his hands on the central console (white, but with a cozy golden glow) and knew he would never more be lonely. And - for the first time since he’d woken in the remains of what had once almost been a Matrix - smiled.

Before he set off, he took a final look at his home. Watched as the planet turned, golden and warm and singular. Something from nothing. His own creation.

But he now fully understood the knife edge between creation and catastrophe, how one could turn from the former to the latter with no warning, a single misstep searing untold destruction into the world; into his own flesh.

As he surveyed the crater where he had met his doom he nodded in silent satisfaction. He’d sent the droids to clear up the wreckage, but also to create a message and reminder for himself, using the shrapnel as building blocks. A little like the geoglyphs of ancient Earth, readable only from space. It stood out starkly against the orange dust, a somewhat grandiose monument to what had been.

  
_(The Seeker’s Folly)_

Lesson learned.

And without a sound the time capsule vanished into the unknowable space between what was and what would be.


End file.
